Review: Girls Will Be Girls
A slow burner in new South Asian cinema.
New South Asian cinema has swept the award shows, with superstar director Payal Kapadia’s All We Know Is Light racking up an impressive list of nominations. But a quieter release has flown under film-festival radars.
Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls is at first as ingenuous as its title lets on: Boarding-school prefect Mira finds herself in love for the first time, an adolescent sexual awakening that unfolds in secret, idle corners, against the background of her her quiet deciduous Himalayan town. Sri, a worldly new student with an admirable distaste for the sexual parochialism around him, is the object of Mira’s affection – he is mature and disarming, adept at managing her moods and scholarly obedience as well as her mother’s suspicions.
Just when you settle into what seems to be a steady teen-romance plot, instability creeps in. Mira’s lonely mother, Anila, is surprisingly permissive, facilitating Mira and Sri’s “study sessions” at her house. The second act sees Anila edge in. The boy, who she first accepted in order to win the affection of her daughter, has awakened Anila’s repressed sexuality and lost childhood, and she competes with Mira for his attention and validation. Filming primarily in Mira’s home, Talati and director of photography Jih-E Peng use the hard angles of 1960s Indian architecture to frame this uncomfortable triangle.
Talati is keen to the psychic lives of her protagonists and demands equally keen attention from the viewer. The film took eight years to make; the script and cinematography relish subtext. Mira and Anila’s sexual repression is externalized in ambiguous moments with Sri. Talati’s film depicts uncertainty, fantasy, and pleasure in a place where their messy consequences can be discussed.
Talati’s film stands in contrast to a certain strain of socially progressive Indian film that often deals with the subjects of sex and gendered violence by going straight to rape and assault. The emphasis on spectacles of brutality pushes mainstream women’s protest movements to prioritize incarceration for perpetrators while ignoring the depravity and everyday misery of restrictive norms around sex and intimacy. The weight of this stifling psychic repression becomes a bedrock of this violence in its more spectacular forms.
The third act of Girls Will Be Girls does offer a glimpse of this, when a pack of school boys runs after Mira –– resentful that she has exposed their abusive tradition of upskirting girls. She locks herself in a room just before they can catch up to her and do god knows what. But Talati’s gift is in the subtleties of daily experience in and around family life, where the first knots of repression are tied and, the ending suggests, can be undone. –Jahnavi Mehta